Playbook
Customers are searching inside ChatGPT and Perplexity now. If your store doesn’t appear, you’re losing share to whoever does. Here’s how to track it, and what actually moves the dial.
A third of consumer queries that used to start in Google now start in ChatGPT or Perplexity. The behaviour is “recommend me a [thing] under [price]”, and the LLM responds with three to five named brands. If your store isn’t in those three to five, you don’t exist for that query — and most operators have no visibility into whether they’re named or not.
We’ve seen Reddit threads from store owners asking the question outright: ‘Why isn’t my dropshipping store showing up in ChatGPT product recommendations?’ The honest answer is that nobody was tracking it, so nobody was optimising for it. That’s the gap ADSTRO’s AI Search Visibility feature closes.
LLMs don’t crawl the web on demand. They build recommendations from training data plus, increasingly, real-time web search. The brands that appear are the ones with: (1) a clear category positioning that’s repeated across many third-party sites, (2) reviews and citations that the model has seen, and (3) for live-search models like Perplexity, recent press or content the model can fetch.
It’s not magic. It’s a downstream effect of what people are saying about you, where, and how often. The first job is to know whether you’re named at all — and the second is to know which prompts you’re winning vs losing.
Inside ADSTRO, write 5 prompts your customers would actually type. ‘Best workout shorts under $50’. ‘Top dropshipping stores for resistance bands’. ‘Affordable alternatives to [your biggest competitor]’. List your brand and your top 5 competitors as the watchlist. We run the prompts daily across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity through one Vercel AI Gateway key, extract brand mentions, and chart share-of-voice over time.
The moment a competitor jumps to position #1 on a prompt where you used to be #1 — you see the swing the same day. That’s the actual playable signal. From there it’s a content + PR + reviews motion. We don’t do the optimisation; we tell you whether what you’re doing is working.
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